Kaifa suyuan 楷法溯源

Kaifa suyuan 楷法溯源 "Origins and history of the standard script" is a book on calligraphy written during the late Qing period 清 (1644-1911) by Pan Cun 潘存, courtesy name Ruchu 孺初, from Wenchang 文昌, Guangdong (today part of Hainan). he obtained his juren degree in (1852) and was a secretary in the Ministry of Revenue (hubu zhushi 戶部主事). Later in his life, he was a lecture in the Qiongzhou Academy (Qiongzhou Shuyuan 瓊州書院, see academies).

The book of 14 juan length has the appearance of a dictionary, presenting different shapes of characters as found in various inscriptions. It was revised by Yang Shoujing 楊守敬 (1839-1915) and enriched with phonetic commentaries by Rao Dunzhi 饒敦秩. The illustrated dictionary explains the transformation of Chinese characters from the small seal script (xiaozhuan 小篆), to the chancery script (lishu 隸書) during the Qin 秦 (221-206 BCE) and Han 漢 (206 BCE-220 CE) periods and finally the standard script (kaishu 楷書) during the Wei 曹魏 (220-265) and Jin 晉 (265-420) periods.

Figure 1. Example of an entry in the Kaifa suyuan 楷法溯源

Various shapes of the character li 禮 . The sources of all variants are indicated.

There were already some studies on the chancery script, like Di Yunsheng's 翟雲升 (1776-1860) Lipian 隸篇, but Pan Cun was the first who systematically analysed the overall transformation on a wide range of characters. The first fascicle is constituted by a chronologically arranged list of more than 700 sources the compilers had used (Gubei jitie mulu 古碑集帖目錄). The division into 14 fascicles follows the common arrangement of the Han-period dictionary Shuowen jiezi 說文解字. The same is true for the individual lemmata which follow the very sequence as provided in the Shuowen jiezi. Pan Cun's book is also known as Jin lipian 今隸篇.

The book was first printed in 1877 by Yang Shoujing. The first Chinese reprint was published in 1986 by the Guangdong Zhongshan Tushuguan 廣州中山圖書館, but in a very small number of copies.